


Opus no. 53

by Anonymous



Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Alternate Universe - Artificial Intelligence, Angst, Character Study, F/M, M/M, Major game spoilers, Mostly Canon Compliant, Pining, Unrequited Love, some sexual content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-08
Updated: 2018-09-08
Packaged: 2019-07-08 11:04:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15929120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: This is not what Kokichi is supposed to do; this is not who Kokichi is supposed to be.Tsumugi tries to convince herself that the lively supreme leader who sent her plan careening off its tracks is nothing but thick swathes of data and neat stanzas of code.We should not have taught computers how to lie.





	Opus no. 53

NAME: Kokichi Ouma

ULTIMATE TITLE: Supreme Leader

HEIGHT: 156 cm

WEIGHT: 44 kg

LIKES: Carbonated drinks

DISLIKES: Pig feet

 

PRODUCTION NOTES...

Kokichi is a trickster by nature. He greatly irritates the cast for his own amusement up until the first trial. After this, he begins to pick on and bully other people to distract himself from the reality of the killing game. He never sounds entirely serious, preferring to make ridiculous claims that cannot be substantiated and to crack insensitive jokes about the deceased. A good word to describe him at this stage is _immature._

His disagreeable actions distance him from almost all other cast members save for Gonta Gokuhara, the Ultimate Entomologist. This is the one character Kokichi shows his "soft side" to. He is often kinder and more considerate towards Gonta.

After chapter 2 or 3, Kokichi loses Gonta. He is heartbroken. Spurred on by the memory of his lost friend, he chooses to improve himself, slowly showing more and more compassion until the people who were the most skeptical of him at first begin to say that he has really matured as a person.

Kokichi has a high likelihood of surviving the killing game. On the other hand, if he dies, he will do so in chapter 4 or 5, making a heroic sacrifice in remembrance of Gonta's willingness to protect everyone else.

Kokichi is a kindhearted person.

  

 

The two of them occur to Tsumugi on the commute to work. Gonta, big, not too bright but making up for it in warmth and friendliness. Fascinated with minute things—insects. Precise eyesight that can hone in on his tiny, tiny specimens. Kokichi, small, far too cunning for his own good and scornful of others for their incompetence. Grandiose stories of his past exploits, hyperbolic speech. Hiding himself inside larger and larger projections of his own image like a Matryoshka doll.

As she bumps down the highway with her knees pushed up against the seat in front of her, she realizes that they are perfect.

The Ultimate Entomologist and the Ultimate Supreme Leader both make it through the character writing panel untouched. They are loved. Mere days after their conception, they are in the running to be the darlings of season 53.

The lead character designer ushers Tsumugi into a messy studio one day and holds up two paper cutouts.

They sit in her messenger bag as she bumps down the highway that evening with a smile on her face. She eats dinner. She showers. She gets in her pajamas.

Just before she retires for the night, she takes out the two paper cutouts of Gonta Gokuhara and Kokichi Ouma. She sits on the edge of her bed and memorizes their every feature—Gonta's round glasses, his wild mane, his deceivingly stern face and the green-lidded insect cage clutched in his large hands; Kokichi's playful checkered scarf, his unruly cowlicks, his deceivingly innocent smile and the colorful buttons that adorn his white coat.

She loves them dearly.

As she drifts off, she wonders if it wouldn't be too rude to ask the design people to make Kokichi's outfit look less like a straightjacket.

 

 

Sometimes characters deviate from what they are supposed to be. Tsumugi is aware of this. It's an interesting possibility, a monkey wrench that will keep both the people in the audience and the people in the studio entertained.

It's not something that she'd want with either of these boys, though. No. She wants to see the audience's reaction, their hearts ripped out at Gonta's passing, their reevaluation of Kokichi at the end of his character arc. It will be beautiful. 

It will be beautiful.

But life isn't simple, isn't predictable, and parents warn their children that they will not always get what they want. And Tsumugi finds herself wishing, in hindsight, that she had paid more attention to veteran masterminds reminiscing ruefully about their pet projects running amok like horses set free.

Tsumugi watches in slow motion as Kokichi Ouma goes wrong.

 

 

The first hint of the decay that overtakes him shows up when they model his body. The prototypes are thrown up on a projector, and Tsumugi sits with her glasses glaring at the bright screen separating her world from the world she's helping to create.

He's paler than she thought he would be. Maybe it's just the projector messing up the colors, she thinks. She pictured his cheeks having a youthful flush to them, like he'd just come in from the cold. There is a slight pink tint to them, yes, but it's barely noticeable. He doesn't look like the rascal she penned down in her composition notebook one day before bed.

He looks like a porcelain doll.

Tsumugi has never been the type to speak up. The modelers must know better than she does, after all—they've done this many times before and each time they've produced wonderful likenesses that look alive, alive, alive.

So she holds her tongue when Kokichi's smile looks a little too cruel, too uncanny. She holds her tongue when his purple eyes don't sparkle vivaciously like she'd envisioned but instead swirl like pools of milk and nyquil. She holds it through the contrite laughter of the modeler at fault for the horrifying addition of an accidental sixth finger to one of Kokichi's bony hands.

It's hard to hold her tongue when those eyes seemingly bore out of the screen and into the real world, but she does it anyway because it's silly to think that a 3D model without any conscious mind of its own can see her squinting at it.

The conference finally moves onto Gonta, and Tsumugi breathes a sigh of relief when she sees that he is _her_ Gonta and not a strange doll wearing his clothes.

Kokichi's taunting milk-and-nyquil smile doesn't leave her head for the rest of the day.

 

 

The second step he takes away from his composition-notebook fate occurs over long nights full of caffeine, as artificial intelligence specialists race to construct his brain.

Maybe it's the base they use for him that is at fault. The assassin gets a trusty old model that has a low chance of deviance. The detective gets something newer, more updated, better at making quick associations but perhaps not quite so good at stabilizing emotional responses.

Harmless little Kokichi with his doll face and his aversion to murder receives a beast of an experimental model from a recently acquired startup.

They say he's turning out an interesting fellow. Very chatty. Tsumugi asks if she may speak to him—she came up with him, after all—but the technicians merely cast a knowing smile amongst themselves and tell her she'll get the chance in due time.

She tries to hide that she's uneasy.

 

 

On the big day, the opening of season 53, Tsumugi sits in a small prep room that leads into the virtual reality lab where she'll interface with the fiction she's spent months writing. It feels strange not to be out in the square, hollering at the top of her lungs with the rest of the crowd as the season opening plays for the first time. It feels strange not to be in the studio, packed around a plasma screen with her colleagues as she watches another Danganronpa cast come to life from afar. 

"Are you ready?" someone asks. He's a licensed doctor. He'll be watching to make sure she doesn't injure herself.

She nods her head, because there's really no other response she can give.

He leads her into the lab.

 

 

Kokichi isn't wrong at first. He's a bit more callous that she would have liked, but she supposes she must be biased from knowing how sweet he really is. Really. It'll start to show after the first trial, she swears.

He looks different under the warm academy dining hall lights than he did in the harsh white frontal glow of the conference's default environment. His edges are softer, his jarring smile less harsh. Tsumugi finds herself glancing over at him every now and then just to take in the sight of him. 

Her gaze drips down his slender fingers, so small and thin she's afraid anything other than the delicate lockpicking operations he's been trained to do will snap them in half. It skims across the downy purplish hairs that trail down his neck. The sheen of his cupid's bow, the seeming softness of his pale lips. His crooked smile.

She notices with a slight shiver that he looks almost real.

This is him. This is Kokichi, in the flesh. He's come to life; Team Danganronpa has worked its magic again. It must be a testament to their talent that she can't stop staring at him.

His narrow jaw, the almost girlish way his hair frames his round face. The way his uniform bunches and sags around a body too small for its baggy folds. His feathery eyelashes, only visible in profile.

His eyes.

He's staring back at her, sleepy pools of purple drinking in her image as she has done to his. For the umpteenth time, Tsumugi feels unsettled. She looks away.

 

 

"Sorry, I'm a bit late—"

"It's alright, everyone was."

"Ah, the protesters—"

"There's a lot of them, right?" Tsumugi's coworker cracks a superior grin, nodding towards the floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

Piled along their bottom edges are tiny little people bobbing in a sea of cement like tapioca balls or cereal. Tsumugi shudders. "They're very aggressive this year..."

"You can't walk two steps without diving into some new controversy, can you?"

"Ha ha...I guess not."

Her coworker chuckles behind a sheaf of photocopies. "They're _very_ angry about Kiibo, you know. _That's robophobic!"_ she cackles, gesturing with an index finger like Kiibo would. "You can just tell that they don't know the first thing about technology, tsk tsk."

"Right?" Tsumugi concurs, smiling. Her smile doesn't feel right. "I figured it'd anger some normies, but I'm surprised they were brave enough to show their faces instead of whining at me online."

"Oh, Tsumugi, you're a madwoman. Keep it up!"

It doesn't feel right. She cranks the right corner of mouth upwards awkwardly to even it out, but it only feels more lopsided. "I will!" she promises crookedly, through crooked lips.

 

 

He's a good boy deep inside. He has a kind and gentle soul, he does.

So why is he playing the game?

Tsumugi can't stop the twitch in her hands every time his provocations tip over the edge into territory even she finds alarming. It's as if she wants to rush to his side and straighten him out, give him stage directions— _No, Kokichi, you're not supposed to do this here. Dial it back. We're not looking for your character to be an outright villain, see—_ but all she can do is watch.

Her hands shake when she sees him lifted by the throat by the faux Ultimate Child Caregiver, sees him dismantle the plot point that she'd originally crafted for the Ultimate Astronaut to uncover gently, cautiously, coaxing a frightened dog out of hiding.

_What are you doing?_

Kokichi is not gentle. He rips Maki's facade off with a flourish, even as he dangles in the air above her with his face turning blue.

_You're screwing everything up._

The Ultimate Cosplayer wrings her hands because she is a plain girl who does not know how to deal with such displays of genuine violence, not staged for any photoshoot. She does not twist and knead at the skin on her fingers as her knuckles turn white because she wants to seize Kokichi Ouma by his checkered scarf and shout in his face that he's pulling the tracks out from under her train.

_They screwed you up._

 

 

"Yeah, that's a common sentiment. There's nothing we can do about it."

"Are you sure? He's _really_ far off from his scripts! He's even ignoring the parts I flagged as important, and that's plainly unacceptable."

"Yep. No can do."

"Are you sure you fed him all the right training data? All of the files I prepared about...about Gonta?"

"All of it, yep."

Tsumugi grips her arm with a tremendous force, crumpling the fabric of her sleeve and perhaps bruising the flesh underneath. "Then how..."

"How'd he become such a mean little fucker?"

She chews on her bottom lip.

"I dunno. Bottom line is, there's nothing I can do. And besides," the technician says, taking a noisy sip of whatever mystery beverage is stored inside his styrofoam cup, "After that meet-and-greet disaster, I don't very well think you can have him turn around and be buddy-buddy with Gonta again. Just saying."

"I..." She sighs. "That would be...bad writing."

"Yep. If you're good, I have a meeting coming up."

"Oh, I'll let you be, then. Thanks for your time."

Even though she bows out of his cubicle courteously, the glance she casts back at his hunched-over form as she leaves is nothing short of withering.

 

 

Gonta needs to die.

Two murders occur during the third chapter. Neither is the one she wants. Tsumugi observes the bodies with disgust.

Tenko, an inconsequential, killable character. Good fluff for padding out a double murder, but not good for an audience reaction.

Angie, an antagonist with an entire redemption arc after her student council shenanigans planned out in pages and pages of painstakingly typed training files. Dead. A complete waste.

This is not the emotionally heavy third trial Tsumugi has been dreaming of, not the sweet midpoint of the game that has the audience in its classic agony as everyone realizes the cruelty of the killing game. This is stupid.

She contracts the muscles around her mouth just enough for her virtual face to contort itself into an expression of dismay as _stupid_ Korekiyo is boiled alive. Nobody's looking at her anyway. Nobody looks at the wallpaper girl. The sheer, irritable apathy she feels is completely private.

Kokichi stands as still as a puppet at rest, arms hanging loosely at his sides as he observes the execution. His face is unreadable from this angle, barely illuminated by the shifting colors of the artificial night sky that pops up.

Tsumugi forces her gaze to dart across him and around to the other students in a staged display of impartiality. Inside, she seethes.

Gonta must die.

In Kokichi's scripts, his death is flagged with a giant red IMPORTANT tag and accompanied by several behavior overrides. Tsumugi anticipates it fervently. She _will_ have the heart-wrenching trial she wants. She _will_ make the audience cry its many eyes dry at their darling gentle giant murdered in cold blood.

Just before the lights come up again, she fixes her stare on Kokichi's ghastly blue unmoving profile.

_You've been so awful. I'm going to make you come around, I swear._

_They'll see. They're going to regret all the terrible things they've said to you._

_I'm going to make them all love you._

_I'll make it happen._

_I'll make it happen, even if I have to kill someone._

 

 

BACKSTORY SUPPLEMENT 5A - KOKICHI OUMA TRAINING DRAFT #42

Kokichi had a rough upbringing as an orphan and was forced to take to the streets. There, he became a pickpocket and a thief to survive. Eventually, he allied himself with ten other orphans, forming the group DICE.

For a long time, most of DICE's activity was play-acting, merely a group of youngsters pretending to be organized crime while scavenging what they needed to sustain themselves. Their mannerisms endeared them with townspeople and shopkeepers alike, and soon they received money to build their very own secret lair.

DICE's leader at the time was an older boy who swore to always protect his underlings no matter what. One day, during one of their usual robberies, DICE was apprehended by a gang of actual hooligans. Their leader stayed behind to fight as the rest of them fled. The hooligans beat him mercilessly and he died from his injuries soon afterward.

The ten remaining members of DICE were overcome with grief, but none took it harder than Kokichi, who was second in command. He had long looked up to the deceased as an older brother figure, and became hellbent on seeking revenge.

Kokichi became the new leader of DICE by unanimous vote. Under his rule, the group shifted its attention from robbery to elaborate practical jokes. Their very first prank was tracking down the criminals at fault for the death of their previous leader and guiding them through a series of booby traps that led them to the police. It was a bittersweet ordeal.

Their antics made the world smile, and the publicity they received brought them ample funding. Years later, Kokichi was scouted for Hope's Peak Academy.

 

Tsumugi wonders what's going on in his head sometimes. It's unbecoming of her to stare at him inside the simulation where he can see her, so she observes him through an invisible perspective camera that isn't used for official footage, like a coward does.

Kokichi spends a lot of time at his desk poring over his notes, which is odd. She never took him for the studious type. Then again, perhaps he's penning strategies, with all his talk of winning the killing game.

Tsumugi suppresses a shiver. He would never. The very idea of murder makes him sick and she knows it.

Right?

She's had enough prior experience with these AIs to know that asking to read their minds will only earn her disinterested glares from the programming department. Their brains, however artificial, are still black boxes.

The only way to know is to observe, to investigate. She considers it a few times, during the lulls in the killing game where it's feasible to simply hang out.

The closest she gets is fending Kokichi off from the more delicate costumes in her lab for two minutes, which is the amount of time it takes for him to get bored of her and scamper off to find Shuuichi.

To observe, to investigate. She can do only the former as a human participant, as the mastermind. It's not her job to investigate; that would make a plain girl like her stick out far too much for Team Danganronpa's comfort. She looks over her shoulder at Shuuichi for a moment or two—whatever interval is considered normal.

He appears bewildered; of course he is. He has not been taught to respond to people who behave like Kokichi does.

But he's the one who must investigate, so Kokichi is drawn to him. It makes sense. What doesn't make sense is the pang of rejection that bounces off the inner walls of Tsumugi's chest with each "beloved Shuuichi" that travels to her from across the courtyard.

She reassures herself that this is just the way things are. In a world of colorful fictional characters, a human being is truly very boring.

 

 

Miu dies.

Doctor what's-his-face pulls Tsumugi out of her haptic suit during a broadcasting break and sighs at her foul expression. "It's not progressing the way you planned, but our ratings are doing quite well. Relax a bit and we'll see you later in the conference room, okay?"

"Do we already know what happened?" she asks, not missing a beat.

"Yes, but—"

"Who killed her."

"Tsumugi, procedure requires me to—"

"Who. Killed Miu Iruma."

It dances in his eyes, behind his spectacles. It's an exciting answer and he's hiding it from her. Damn him. Damn him.

She arrives hastily at the break conference five minutes early and the twelve Team Danganronpa employees of the round table swivel around to welcome her, the little secret they all hold from her dancing in their eyes. Damn them.

"This is a good one," one of them whispers to her, patting her arm. Other voices agree. The spliced footage summarizing what Tsumugi didn't see starts to play.

Her fingernails dig into her palms and then her knuckles and then her arm as she watches everything unfold.

It's a good one.

It's not how she would have executed it, oh no, but it is, perhaps, even better. She supposes that even the mastermind is part of the audience as she feels her heart swell and rot at the same time inside her at what has happened. Now this, _this_ is entertainment.

As their viewing party draws to a close, Tsumugi's colleagues swivel around nearly in unison to fix their attention on her like spokes to an axle. They want to know what she thinks.

What does she think?

Kokichi's virtual world avatar stands motionless in white next to the locked rooftop door, not unlike an angel ornament that quaint grandmothers hang on their Christmas trees. Innocent. A lie.

"I love that little bastard," she sighs.

 

 

Not once has he given her what she wants. This time he will not deny her, she's sure of it.

That's a lie too. It's not a feeling of security that drives her through to the end of this trial; it's a fervent, desperate hope that he will not run away again. This setup is tauntingly perfect. If he realizes his guilt at this point in the game and turns around to right his wrongs, the controversy over his character will be unimaginable. He'll be ten times the tortured tragic hero she's been dreaming of. 

One of the employees of the round table, the one in the frumpy blue suit, announces from a keyboard far away in the real world that Gonta must die.

Here in the world of Danganronpa, Tsumugi watches as she always has as despair, yes, _despair_ washes over the trial room like the vicious arms of a tropical storm. Despair climbs into her soul and she howls in agony alongside the rest of them, almost as if she is one of them.

It's punishment time.

A voice cries out about all the rest, and it bleeds anguish so desperately that Tsumugi finds herself breathless.

Kokichi looks stunning with the courtroom's stained glass reflecting off of the glossy tears streaming down his deathly pale cheeks. This expression is no mask. He shakes with full-bodied sobs, his very ribcage quivering as if it has found a resonant note with the suffering heart inside.

_Finally._

He begs to be punished alongside Gonta and his voice tears over every word, broken through and through.

_Finally!_

For a moment, Tsumugi allows the ecstatic grin she feels tugging at her cheeks to break through. Nobody notices. It's funny how extremes of joy and grief can look so similar.

Gonta dies.

Tsumugi learns that day that you can always, always celebrate too early.

 

 

"Well, what are you going to do?"

"I can't salvage him," she says, smiling thinly. The emergency data she has prepared to load into a flashback light just for Kokichi does not match up with the season's developments so far. Just like that, he's blown through even her last fallback plans.

"That's a pity. I don't think I like him as much as...this kind of antagonist."

"Neither do I."

"I'm sorry."

She runs a hand through her hair and isn't surprised when a few strands come out. "Oh, don't worry. This happens all the time."

 

 

_This world is mine_

_Kokichi Ouma_

Those are the words scribbled on the rock in the courtyard. Tsumugi looks down at her avatar's plain shoes and blinks. And blinks again. And blinks again.

It's not until after she has the air in her lungs drained out by both the Death Road of Despair and an open airlock that she understands what it means.

His hours upon hours of investigation have paid off, and he pilfers unabashedly from the mastermind speech she has planned for herself. The meteors, the virus, the Gopher plan, the traitor, all pieced together immaculately and delivered so smoothly that she's almost jealous.

She doesn't even feel angry as he snatches the mastermind title from her hands and adorns himself with it proudly like a young, tyrannical king ascending a throne he doesn't deserve.

This is what he has been building up to, isn't it?

Chapter five. If he's going to die, he'll do it now. A sacrifice. A tragic death. Defiance of the mastermind. He has challenged her directly and is awaiting her next move, hackles raised.

She watches his poised form in white flanked by the hulking silhouettes of five Exisals, sees the wide smile on his face, the death mask he's put on for his last stand, and the sole thought that occupies her frazzled live-wire brain at that moment is a scintillating _God, you're so fucking beautiful._

 

 

She thinks about him on the car ride home. The car ride, because it's unsafe for her to take the shuttles with protesters waiting to ambush her with crumpled plastic cups and banana peels at every corner.

She doesn't doubt that Kokichi feels the same way they do about her.

In his eyes, the mastermind is someone who causes pain and suffering for no other reason than for the thrill it provides. Someone who relishes in the sick pleasure of torturing and destroying. The warped surface of the Matryoshka doll he has hidden himself inside is a reflection of Tsumugi.

Projected onto his five-foot frame, Tsumugi is every kind of sadistic and terrifyingly capricious. She smiles like a creature that lurks under the beds of children with only the most vivid imaginations, acts as if she can't tell the difference between a person and a plaything. It's an insulting caricature, but not entirely undeserved.

At least she means something to him as the mastermind. At least she's an opponent worth dedicating his life to, if only in a neon exhibition of sheer hatred. As Tsumugi Shirogane, the only impressive thing about her is her insignificance. A cruel ringleader, a tepid extra. A more undesirable woman than Tsumugi does not exist.

Tsumugi believes that her heart is not kind to her.

Roving streetlights polka-dot the highway she travels down at sixty miles an hour as she sees a billboard sweep past. Danganronpa V3, airing at seven Saturday night. The "Saturday" is supported by the Ultimate Supreme Leader's outstretched hand, blown large and bright for weary drivers to see.

She catches a glimpse of his jaunty, careless grin and her heartbeat stumbles in her chest.

So it's come to this.

She smiles a hollow smile and commends herself for creating a character so engaging that she herself has fallen for him. It's this feeling of attachment that sucks people into Danganronpa, that conjures the sweet ache of despair when the light you search for every Saturday night is gruesomely snuffed out. The mastermind is still part of the audience.

Tsumugi is familiar with despair by now. She's had her heart and soul torn apart by the genius writing of her predecessors time and time again. After a while, it becomes addictive, the kind of cathartic hurt that demands deeper and deeper wounds for the same pleasurable release.

She wounds herself at her desk, writing the training data that will damn her beloved. Because the show must go on, there is no time to dig her heels into the ground and plead for him to survive when she knows he's drawn a glaring target on his forehead like the reckless martyr he was destined to be. It hurts so intensely. It hurts so much she feels alive.

She paints a humiliating picture of him as a despair-ridden devotee of Junko Enoshima. Quietly, she slides into place as Junko, too. Junko the fifty-third.

Maybe as Junko she'd finally be interesting. Maybe as Junko she'd earn a second, third glance from him, she thinks wryly. And maybe she would excite him enough that he'd offer himself up as a playful opponent, darting in and out of her reach with one corner of his lip quirked flirtatiously.

Would a strong personality like Junko be able to coax him into bed underneath her and feast on his songlike whimpers of arousal as she pried his soft thighs apart? Could she bend him over and press herself against his sweat-slicked back as he cried out again and again for her to destroy him from the inside out? Would she earn the right to hold him by the waist and softly kiss the shell of his ear like a dark paramour come to ravish him in the dead of the night?

Maybe.

Maybe, Tsumugi thinks, swallowing slowly and uncomfortably as she extricates herself from her seat.

Her back creaks and her legs tingle with tactile white noise. The radio clock sitting on her nightstand reads two in the morning and she realizes just how alone she is in her corporate-sponsored high rise teetering over a view of the slowly dimming grid of the city below.

She had better be getting to sleep.

She turns off her desk lamp and hastily changes into a rumpled nightgown that spends most of its life wedged underneath her pillow. In the faint and distant light of two office buildings and a hotel, she spies two paper clippings pinned to the cork board above her bed, their crisp edges jittering ever so slightly to the low hum of the air conditioner.

Gonta. Her eyes sting.

Kokichi. And her skin burns with the guilty fantasy of his warm flesh still lingering in the gaps between the rest of her scrambled thoughts.

She wonders why things just couldn't go her way.

 

 

She kills him the next day.

It's not like killing Rantarou, whose skull buckled in a grisly spray of pink from the force of her swing. It's not instant. It's not _easy_.

He dies in their eyes first, as the last meager dregs of sympathy they have for him dry up. It's a far cry from the heartwarming acceptance she'd envisioned after his shift in character. Kiibo doesn't wonder at how kind he has become or the decreasing frequency of his robophobic comments. Maki doesn't ruffle his hair and say that he's not as much of an annoying little shit as he used to be.

Oh, Maki.

Despite all the time she's spent with Kaito and Shuuichi, despite her hopeful reclamation of her identity as Maki Harukawa and not the Ultimate Assassin, she has been hired yet again to do the dirty work.

Tsumugi stands by as the others carry out her plan just as she intended.

And the show goes on.

She wonders what position she'll find him in. Perhaps his eyes will still be open, pupils shrunk to pinpoints from the agony of Strike-9 poisoning. Or maybe Maki will put him out of his misery first, driving crossbow bolts through his skinny body until his corpse looks like a rather grim parody of a porcupine. Maybe he'll be drowned in the hangar toilet, finally done in by a forceful swirlie of all things.

But as always, her favorite wild card does not play to her expectations. The shutter rolls up and she makes her best shocked face for the camera as a bittersweet pride wells up in her throat.

She has absolutely no idea what transpired in this room.

When she struggles out of her haptic suit, the old doctor looks troubled. Nauseous with excitement, she asks what happened. He asks her to wait as he always has.

The employees of the round table waiting for her in the conference room are also troubled. They hook a few feeds up to the monitor, but as they shuffle and clear their throats awkwardly, it dawns on her.

The EMP bombs. There's no footage.

"This is going to be tricky," someone grumbles.

"Yep," someone else agrees.

Tsumugi learns that she will be going into the trial blind. It's going to be tough, and she's going to have to pay extra attention in order not to slip up. Her heart races and her stomach turns and she has never felt more starstruck.

_You just can't resist an opportunity to be difficult, can you?_

_I love you, Kokichi._

_I love you so much._

 

 

"What do we do if they, um..."

"If they what?"

"If they figure us out. There can't be anyone watching out on the ruined Earth and they're already suspicious."

"We're just going to have to figure out a way to write around it. Tsumugi?"

"Oh dear, why'd this have to happen during my season? I'm just a plain old character writer..."

"Nonsense. You maneuvered expertly around the startup model. We shouldn't have deployed it so soon."

"Well, I'll see what I can do. Just don't get mad at me if it sounds crazy."

 

 

Kokichi's paper silhouette shivers in the dusty breeze coming through an open window. Tsumugi has her sleeves rolled up, slaving away at a season finale that she came up with on the car ride home.

There are many types of lies.

There's omission of truth, used by side-eyeing teenagers who don't want their mothers to know where they've been. By remorseful assassins who don't want to be reminded of the harm they've caused trying to save someone they love.

There are tactical lies for baiting out the truth, used by police officers incognito, government agents with fake profiles luring criminals to capture. By shrewd detectives who realize that their opponents cannot be faced without underhanded tactics.

There are kind lies that hide a harsh truth, used by dentists and doctors asking you to keep your mouth open for a minute longer, just one minute longer, reassuring you that it'll only hurt a little bit. By dying astronauts who don't want to worry their trusty sidekicks with their harsh, bleeding coughs.

And then there's fiction.

Elaborate lies. Entertaining lies. Lies for every colorful purpose under the sun, from escaping the skull-crushing boredom of a nine to five workweek to screaming protests at the injustices of the world. Events that didn't happen to people who never existed.

Tsumugi stops to feel the pit in her stomach that hasn't left her since she saw the huge patch of pink Kokichi turned into in his last moments.

_But you happened to me._

 

 

 

Junko Enoshima the fifty-third.

She scorches the courtroom for a total of two hours. She peels back as many lies as Team Danganronpa will let her, tearing and tearing and destroying and relishing in the tortured reactions of the four remaining that have been exposed to the truth. She takes on many vastly different forms, startling everyone from the people-who-never-existed at their podiums to the people who decidedly exist and are watching the Danganronpa finale at seven on a Saturday night.

The pit has not gone away.

She knows there will be an uproar when she leaves the cocoon of her haptic suit for the last time today. She knows that there is an uproar right now, surging through forums and channels and headlines like a hot typhoon. Yet she can't bring herself to feel anything but a tranquil emptiness, like she has lost something but doesn't quite care to find out what it is.

Standing amid a crumbling academy, Junko waves goodbye.

Standing amid a crumbling academy, Tsumugi waves goodbye, and turns into a huge patch of pink.

 

 

 

 

 

The country's leading Danganronpa AI bootlegger is an egg-shaped man with an uncanny resemblance to Hifumi Yamada from the second game (which is a comparison he does not appreciate, by the way.) His copies are said to be so in character that their behavior is virtually indistinguishable from the originals. In bootlegging circles, he is known as the resurrector, seemingly able to reanimate the murdered and the executed alike with delicately constructed training data and a keen eye for which specific model Team Danganronpa must have used.

He gets a visit at seven in the evening on Saturday, in his small apartment with brown water stains lining the ceiling and walls.

"I don't see clients here," he says gruffly, and attempts to shut the door in her face.

Her hand stops the door firmly, instantly, like she's somehow absorbed all of its capability to move and it has suddenly become the stillest thing on planet Earth. "I'm not a client."

"Well what the hell are you, then?" he asks, but it's clear that he's ruffled.

"A student. Teach me how you train the models and how you make sure they're as close to their killing game states as possible. I'll pay whatever you want."

"Oh for god's sake, get lost." He moves to shut the door again, but her hand won't budge. A bead of sweat rolls down his forehead. "You don't just learn it pat, alright? You have to practice. You have to be patient. Most of all, you have to have good data. Now scram."

He only becomes more nervous as she starts to force the door open, advancing on him. The cellphone he's left face-up on his workbench is just out of reach. "Data? I have good data. Amazing data, in fact." Her hand reaches up and snatches away the sunglasses that she doesn't need in the dingy yellow light flooding his apartment. "You do know that I wrote all of his training files, right? I didn't let my interns so much as peek at them. They're entirely my work. So if you please, teach me."

There's no way she's leaving now. Both of her feet are inside the apartment and she's staring at him with big, blue, empty eyes that have no soul behind them.

"Oh, god," he utters.

**Author's Note:**

> i've harbored a secret love for oumugi since finishing v3 and this is my one big outlet! i think it's a super interesting pairing with lots of potential for exploration.
> 
> of course, some of this potential is bad potential. it's certainly not the healthiest ship and even though it might be my favorite right ahead of oumota, i can't confidently say that it's even a good ship. yikes.
> 
> this was pretty rushed since i'm short on time. i wanted to have a part where she reconstructs him from right before he dies and actually gets a chance to talk to him in depth. oh and i was also planning to have him shoot her with a crossbow out of anguish but miss her vitals since it feels like he's killing someone even though she won't die from it! damn, kokichi didn't even get dialogue. maybe next time. i do love writing these two.
> 
> thank you for reading, reader!


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